Place your Bets! Guess what the next Everdrive will be....

What makes you think an EverDrive for NES would be sigificantly cheaper? The PowerPAK actually isn't that expensive. If you are getting interference you may want to try adding shielding as well as checking if your video cable runs parallel to any power cables.

 

Its not a cabling problem. The powerpak, at least on an rgb modded nes/av fami will produce jailbars (or at least more significant jailbars) in the same cabling setup as a regular game which doesn't produce that level of interference. Drakon has noticed this in his av fami mods - looks great with a regular cart, but noticeable jailbars with the powerpak.

 

jail bars probably because powerpack eat much more energy than original cart, may be good ac adapter may fix it

 

In that case, try powering your NES with the Genesis model 1 power adapter which outputs 9 volts up to 1.2amps. The NES will accept DC or AC so that will be ok. Typical NES power adapters probably don't have as much amperage.

 

Perhaps the next ED product could be a loader (Optical drive) emulator? SD card contains an OS boot disc image which could then be used to select an ISO image?

Such work was done for the XBOX360 & Wii using low cost SoC chips coupled to cheap CPLD's.

It would be some work, but the ground work could be done with all CD based consoles in mind?

I could help with research plus a few hundred free SoC chips

 

I don't know about Saturn or DreamCast but the PS1 laser assembly which plugs in via a ribbon is not as straight forward as you may think. I've been told that trying to emulate it would be quite difficult to do since there is a CD-ROM controller on the motherboard that drives it.

While it would be cool, considering modchips cost less than $5 and are easy to install and you can still buy brand new laser assemblies, I can't see it being a profitable thing to develop right now.

 

Sure. That is why I described them by their technical term of "loaders". Not IDE/SATA ATAPI devices.

PS1 is a double no. Hardware too cheap and emulators too good. But Atari Jaguar CD, Saturn and Dreamcast (ok so perhaps Dreamcasts are uber cheap too).

It was just a thought for the future.

(I think the Jaguar CD Unit is probably too complicated too.. it's not just a loader)

 

Famicom sounds nice. Much better IMO than owning numerous pirate carts with overlapping games, fewer titles than advertised, lame hacked versions, low budget design quality... Main problem is trying to support famiclones would be ludicrous. Way too many of varying adherence to Nintendo specs.

NES powerpak is rather bulky and requires a converter. Some of which don't connect the pins properly making them need modding for special audio.

 

NES powerpak here works great. It even plays famicom disk system games.

I've made a single file for every battery ram game to by-pass the no save file creation problem. So it's 100% satisfaction here.

 

Single file? Huh I guess I haven't tried games that need saves on it yet.

 

Just tried with genesis ac adapter on drakon's modded av fami (av fami is the nes console generally considered least susceptible to jailbars, at least with modders,) no improvement.

 

Drakons AV fami looks like crap anyway. The colours are all wrong before you even start.

 

IIRC official Nintendo emulators can't agree on NES colors, let alone fan mod projects. I think Animal Crossing might've looked different from their later versions like Zelda Collector's Edition.

 

Silly hyperbole. The emphasis bit dealy is certainly annoying with the few games it affects, and I guess you can get a little pedantic over kid dracula looking too yellow, but the only place I've ever seen outrage over that pallet was nesdev. RGB mods have been done for years before that guy and noone was particularly steamed over it. Lets also consider the fact that Nintendo itself found it fine for their playchoice 10 systems and for the box screenshots of many nes titles.

 

The reason those at NESDEV complain is because they care and notice. Lots of people less knowledgeable thought Nesticle was perfect or any other number of emulators that had clear problems. NES RGB mods are not that popular, as RGB itself isn't that popular.

There are plenty of reasons to be against it like Color Emphasis not working on it and the palette not lining up with the official NTSC PPU's output. If someone cloned the PPU to output RGB but had the color emphasis and palette issues solved, it would be excellent.

Lum, what do "official nintendo emulators" have to do with anything? Just because Nintendo back in 1983 designed the Famicom doesn't mean they are somehow the best knowledgeable with the hardware. They didn't make some perfect emulator. Infact the emulator used was likely not programmed by any Nintendo employee at all. It was probably contracted out. Or stolen as that is popular to do too. Many commercial emulation based releases or collections probably use code stolen directly from open source emulators such as MAME.

 

Please don't compare a different pallete, used by actual Nintendo hardware, to poor emulation.

I'm personally against being stuck with composite video in the year 2011, and am OK with using a very similar color pallete in order to resolve that. This discussion was originally about the powerpak though, which literally, objectively degrades the image quality of the nes. Jailbars are way more noticeable/annoying than the green in contra being brighter.

You can get the colors even closer with a couple of pots, and there is some discussion of the vs top gun pallete being even closer to the original nes pallete (requires more effort to implement though, and good luck finding a vs top gun)

http://nfggames.com/forum2/index.php?topic=1592.240

edit: please don't say only people on nesdev care or notice the color differences. People don't hunt down playchoice pcbs, invest in nice upscalers, get their console modded and develop scanline generators because they don't care.

 

I didn't say they don't care. I said NESDEV folks may be upset cause they care.

I fail to see what your point is about the year and Composite Video. That is irrelevant. The NES outputs Composite Video which is best viewed on a quality CRT display. Honestly it looks good on my CRT. It looks like crap on a HDTV but that's not its fault. While I'd love to see a NES PPU replacement, I think that butchering nice arcade hardware to do RGB output is a real shame.

 

:banghead: That is a turn of phrase dude. CRTs aren't getting any more common, and even then, composite still looks worse than s-video or a component / RGB connection on a crt. I'd love to have a bunch of sony pvms or an nec xm29 but they aren't particularly plentiful around here, and are going die eventually (how old are most of those at this point?)

And playchoice 10 hardware isn't that rare, or at least thats what it appears like when theres multiple ones being sold every week by that amigan guy on ebay.

 

CRTs can be repaired. They will last a long time. Hopefully by the time you cannot get a hold of one there will be new NES clones or more likely we will all rely on emulation at that point.

 

Nothing specific. I was only trying to make a point about consensus (or potential lack thereof) on the system's "correct" colors.